Re: [Mind's Eye] Re: My fellow zombies

Of the various choices before you , you choose to do that which your
nature decides upon at any given moment. You may let go an opportunity
now to fiercely grasp at a later moment. The choice, of course , is
yours but you are under the control of various motivating forces
which, taking control of your very free will, make you do that which
the strongest force within you at a given moment wants to be done.
That which you do today you will not do tomorrow and all with a
seemingly free will. You can con yourself by opening and closing your
grip that you are the master , but you are not. It is only your
reasoning processes which are at play , which take control over you at
times just as your basic desires. When you think it appears that you
are thinking freely but actually it is some part of your personality
which is carrying you along. If you take psycho-tropic drugs you will
think and act in a bizarre manner but with what to you is free will.

On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 12:14 AM, Jo <jojocasamento@gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't understand how some can say we don't have free will. You can
> choose to do anything you want at any given time. How is that not free
> will?
>
> On Aug 2, 12:51 pm, archytas <nwte...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> "We have access to a technology that would have looked like sorcery in
>> Descartes's day: the ability to peer inside someone's head and read
>> their thoughts. Unfortunately, that doesn't take us any nearer to
>> knowing whether they are sentient. "Even if you measure brainwaves,
>> you can never know exactly what experience they represent," says
>> psychologist Bruce Hood at the University of Bristol, UK.  If
>> anything, brain scanning has undermined Descartes's maxim. You, too,
>> might be a zombie. "I happen to be one myself," says Stanford
>> University philosopher Paul Skokowski. "And so, even if you don't
>> realise it, are you." Skokowski's assertion is based on the belief,
>> particularly common among neuroscientists who study brain scans, that
>> we do not have free will. There is no ghost in the machine; our
>> actions are driven by brain states that lie entirely beyond our
>> control. "I think, therefore I am" might be an illusion.
>> So, it may well be that you live in a computer simulation in which you
>> are the only self-aware creature. I could well be a zombie and so
>> could you. Have an interesting day." (from a recent New Scientist)
>>
>> We range over debates in free will and what it is to be human. So far
>> we haven't established free will or even that we are not merely
>> avatars in 'something else's game'.
>>
>> I wonder whether there are advantages in considering ourselves as
>> creatures limited by programming and also capable of it?